Mother, Please! (19 page)

“What knife?” he asked with a growl, his eyes flashing.

“The one Johnny used on my uniform top. I knocked it out of his hand before you arrived. I don’t think he knew where it landed.” She pulled aside her unbuttoned tunic and showed him her scar.

And then, as if her mother wasn’t sitting on the sofa three feet away, he reached up and touched her.

He ran his thumb over the faded welt along her collarbone, once and then repeated the caress again until he’d raised her temperature there, as if he could rub away the evidence of the long-ago crime. “I should’ve killed the bastard.”

“Which is why I never told anyone. It’s been hard enough living with the hurt I caused by being so stupid. Living with anything else…” And that was it. She’d had enough.

Stepping back and buttoning her top, she glanced toward her mother. “I’ve got to go to work to cover the afternoon for Yvette. You and David are welcome to the croissants that are left. I’ll pick up the basket later.”

Suzannah got to her feet, held out a hand. “Avery, sweetie, if you’re still speaking to me, I’d like to ask a favor of you.”

“Of course I’m speaking to you.” She was surprised anyone was still speaking to her! “What is it?”

“Well, Leslie will be back in town next weekend,” Suzannah was saying, as if already having put the last few minutes behind her. “And I was wondering if we could come up on Saturday evening for dinner at your place?”

“Dinner?” After a morning of witnessed kisses and confessions, her mother was making weekend plans for dinner?

Suzannah’s expression was hopeful and also a bit mischievous. Even challenging. “We were talking about our children this morning, and I would like very much for the two of you to meet. David, you come, too. We’ll play cards and have a relaxing evening.”

Avery looked from one to the other, thinking it would be a miracle if she ever had a nice, relaxing evening again.

L
EANING CLOSE
to the oval mirror hanging over her bathroom’s pedestal sink, Avery applied a light pink gloss to her lips, the shade a match to the summery frost with which she’d painted her nails earlier.

Painting her nails, of course, had brought to mind David’s touch. Shivering, she curled her toes in her purple leather slides. Two days later, Monday morning now, and the feel of the thumb he’d rubbed over her blue polish was as real as that of his mouth pressed to hers, as that of the imprint his fingertips left on her shoulder.

She needed to shake this obsession that had intensified a thousandfold in the past forty-eight hours. It had to be unhealthy the way he seemed to be so much on her mind. She’d spent too many stolen moments over the past fifteen years allowing her thoughts to drift in his direction.

It had to stop here and stop now.

No, she hadn’t put her life on hold waiting to hear from him or wondering about what might have
been and what had happened to him. That would have been even more absurd than thinking of him in the first place as often as she had.

In fact, until he’d walked back into her life, she still pictured him as the freckled and gangly teen he’d once been.

That image had been erased in one long breathtaking moment the day he’d followed her mother up the staircase to where Avery had been standing on the second-floor landing, trying to fit her key into her front-door lock.

She’d known, of course, that her mother was showing the empty third-floor space to a new tenant, but when she’d looked down to see broad male shoulders taking up most of the narrow staircase’s width, she’d reacted the way single women did to gorgeous men—she’d checked for a wedding band and then she’d moved her gaze to his.

It was a strange thing, the familiarity she’d felt, looking into eyes that searched out hers with the same curiosity—though a curiosity more intense. After all, David had been well aware of who she was. She’d been the one at a disadvantage.

And then he’d smiled.

That moment, that smile, had defined the past ten months of unrest she’d been living—just as that moment beneath the bleachers had impacted her life. She’d wondered so often what sort of boy Da
vid Marks had really been that he would take on Johnny Boyd for her? Why had she never taken the time to know him? She’d been so self-involved, so shallow, that’s why.

She slipped the pot of lip gloss down into her bag and chose a small compact of smoky-mauve eye shadow, her stomach tightly knotted with old guilt but also with a new anticipation brought by Saturday’s kiss. And, oh, what a kiss.

She couldn’t remember any man’s mouth ever sweeping her away as David’s had. Sure, she’d dated, had relationships, come close once to an engagement until realizing that something didn’t click quite right.

Not the way she and David had clicked there in her mother’s kitchen.

The fact that she was putting on more than her usual mascara and blush, that she was wearing lacy rather than practical panties, that she was timing her departure for work to coincide with his, tempting fate and that very narrow staircase…those were the most obvious pieces of evidence that she was skating on thin ice here by focusing on that kiss. She had no way of knowing if taking this risk—
God, but she hated risk
—would result in another disaster.

The fantasies she’d had of taking their kiss further, of unbuttoning David’s shirt and slipping it from his shoulders, of moving her fingers to his belt
buckle, the button fly of his jeans, of what might have happened had her mother not interrupted….

She hadn’t yet shaken the feel of his bare skin, the resilience of flesh and muscle on his back, the strength he so easily checked as he touched her gently, reverently, as if he was the one who’d been nervous. David Marks, nervous. She couldn’t even imagine.

Shivering, she fluffed at her blown-dry and bouncy blond layers that she usually wore pulled back in a scrunchie. See? She was primping and preening when she had no guarantee of seeing him and no business making herself up for a man in the first place. She was setting the women’s movement back decades, dressing for a man instead of for comfort and practicality.

She glanced at her watch.
Ack!
She was out of time and probably too late as it was. He left for school at seven, and it was already three minutes after. She quickly finished her eye shadow, having decided to add it at the last minute after applying her mascara. It would serve her right for her vanity to ruin her seduction.

Seduction?
Funny! She stopped, frowned, then shook off the ridiculous thought and returned the rest of her makeup to her bag. If anything, she was engaged in a harmless flirtation. A simple testing of the waters that had been swirling around her ankles
now for months. Or that’s what she would have been doing had she been more on the ball here this morning.

As it was, when she finally pulled open her door, it was to the sound of the triplex’s shared entrance closing downstairs. Well, crap. She was obviously more out of practice flirting than she’d realized. So much for the best-laid, last-minute plans, she thought with a sigh, turning her lock and closing the door behind her.

She’d only just headed toward the staircase when she heard the door at the foot of the stairs open. She paused on the edge of the landing, looking down as David walked inside and glanced up. Her stomach’s resident butterflies fluttered their wings wildly at the smile spreading over his face.

One hand on the staircase railing, she took her first step down. “Forget something?”

He nodded, climbed two steps toward her. “I heard your door.”

The butterflies were joined by dozens of hummingbirds.

“You came back because you heard my door?”

Another step up, another nod. “I wanted to test my new staircase theory.”

She forced her feet to move, managing to descend two whole steps. Her chest tightened. Her
throat ached with her effort to speak. “What theory would that be?”

“It’s pretty simple, really.” One step, two steps, three steps, four. His eyes glittered and he stopped. He stood almost at eye level now. Only one lonely step remained untaken. “Now that there’s not so much baggage in the way, I thought we might want to test out how narrow this staircase really is.”

She pulled in a deep breath. “That baggage has weighed me down for a very long time, you know.”

He nodded. “I know.”

“I just wanted to be sure that you did. That you didn’t think I’d forgotten anything that happened.” A shiver coiled sharply at the base of her spine; her fingers trembled and she tightened her grip on the railing. “That I’d blown it off as if it were nothing.”

His expression softened as he studied her, his hands shoved into his navy Dockers front pockets. She watched him flex his hands, wondering if he wanted to reach for her because she so wished he would. “I never thought you blew off anything, Avery. You’re not that type.”

Curious that he thought he knew her, she mused, tilting her head to one side. “What type am I?”

He inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly. His knee shook as if he wanted more than anything to move up that one last remaining step. But he stayed where
he was. “Do you remember when we played that football game in Alpine? Our senior year?”

She smiled. “And it was, like, ten degrees?”

“More like twenty,” he said with a laugh. “But, yeah. It was cold. And afterward everyone was on the bus ready to go and yelling at me to hurry up?”

“But your zipper was stuck and you could only get halfway out of your costume.” She hadn’t thought of that night for years.

“Pretty damn humiliating, I gotta say.” The corner of his mouth quirked enough for his dimples to appear. “But you got off the bus and came around behind me to—”

She interrupted him with a laugh. “I almost smacked you because you wouldn’t stand still. It was like trying to help a dog who wouldn’t stop chasing its tail.”

“You were so close,” he said, his face coloring slightly. “I wanted to see you. To see what you were doing. I wasn’t used to having cute girls feeling up my backside,” he added with a grin.

He was so cute, so vulnerable in his admission. Her heart beat harder, faster, against the walls of her chest. “It was your shirttail. You wouldn’t have been able to get it loose on your own. You’d probably caught it when you zipped the tornado top to the bottom.”

Chuckling, he shook his head. “You never told me that.”

She shrugged. “I’m telling you now.”

“Dumping more of that baggage?” he asked, one brow lifting.

“David?”

“Avery?”

She relaxed her tight grip on the railing, knowing she was going to have to touch him and touch him soon or totally go out of her mind. “I don’t think of all of our shared history as baggage. Only what I caused to happen to you.”

His face darkened. “It was my choice to go after Johnny.”

“You should’ve run for help,” she said, because she’d wished so often that he had.

“You’re kidding me, right?” His voice echoed gruffly, painfully, as if the choice to intervene had been one he’d never consciously made but one that had been preordained. “You think I could’ve run off and left you there?”

“Johnny was almost twice your size,” she said, sensing the argument wasn’t going to get her anywhere. Not judging by the fierceness of his expression.

“Yeah, but I was crazy in love with you.”

The tone of his voice caressed her, a soft breeze stirring the exposed tips of her feelings, a gentle tug
on her heartstrings playing their song. She’d known of his crush, had recognized the puppylike affection behind his flirtatious bids for attention and ignored him, discouraged him.

But love? Crazy in love?

“Oh, David,” she said, closing the distance between them, taking one last step, the final step, a literal movement that meant more than putting them face-to-face as she stood on the stair above.

And then she swallowed hard because his eyes flared with a heat she longed to feel on her body, a heat she knew would burn her from the inside out.

Her arms went around his neck, his came around her waist and he pulled her close, nuzzling the skin beneath her ear and whispering soft words she couldn’t make out. She didn’t care what he was saying. His meaning couldn’t have been more clear when his big broad hands settled one above the other in the small of her back.

He felt wonderfully right in her arms. She wanted his kiss, and he readily complied, his lips settling over hers with an intent that was nowhere as hesitant as that of Saturday morning.

This time he was sure of what he wanted and increased the pressure accordingly. Avery willingly parted her lips and took his tongue into her mouth, responding in kind and teasing him with quick
flicks in and out and around until he growled and moved one determined hand to the back of her head.

He was no longer gentle but sweetly demanding with a pressure she was loath to resist. When he turned her body and backed her into the wall, her bottom contacting the staircase railing, she simply closed her eyes and accepted the weight of his body as if she’d been waiting all of her life to feel him like this.

Like this, with one of his hands threaded into her hair and the other cupping her backside and pulling her firmly to him. Like this, with his chest pressed solidly to her breasts, his breathing hard and heavy. Like this, with a knee wedged between her legs and pushing upward.

She wanted him now; she wanted him naked and moving above her and forever. She was out of her mind with the way she wanted him, with the way he knew to make her body sing. Her heart thundered madly. Her breasts grew heavy, the taut tips aching to feel the brush of his smooth, bare skin.

A whimper escaped her mouth, and David swallowed the sound, growling in answer, grinding his hips to hers. The hard ridge of his erection settled firmly against her belly. She lifted her arms from around his neck, slipping her hands behind him and tugging his white oxford shirttails free.

She skated her hands up and down his back, loving the feel of skin on skin, wanting more than was allowed by their position and by the narrow width of the staircase. David took her cue, finding the elastic waistband of her lavender capris beneath her white polo shirt and slipping his fingers beneath.

This time the sound she made was one of hunger and need. She tore her mouth away from his and begged. “David, please. Let’s go inside. My mother could come out any minute. Please, I don’t want—”

He silenced her with a finger to her lips. And then he shook his head. “I’m late for class. I’ve got to go.” He took a deep, shuddering breath and rested his forehead on hers. “Besides, going inside means going to bed. And I’m not sure we’re ready.”

She shut her eyes tightly, not wanting to hear what he was saying because she knew that he was right. Just because they fit together on the staircase—

“Avery, look at me.”

She did, and her heart went wild.

“I didn’t say that I didn’t want you.” He pressed her lower body flush to his and made his meaning known. “I want you more than I want to breathe right now. But I’ve got to go.”

She nodded because it seemed like an obvious
response and he’d robbed her of the ability to speak. Wanting her more than he wanted to breathe. She swallowed and found enough of her voice to say, “I know.”

But he wasn’t through. “What do you know?”

“That you have to get to class.”

“And?” he asked, one brow lifted.

She felt the heat sure to be splotching her cheeks bright pink. “That you want me.”

He exhaled as if she’d freed him from a fifteen-year-old burden. “Good. Now. Dinner. Tonight, yes? We’ll pick this up again where we left off.”

“Okay,” she agreed, nodding. “I can meet you wherever you’d like.”

“Your choice,” he said, his eyes sparkling with an intensity that was nothing if not deliciously, wickedly, all about sex. “Your place or mine.”